Frost Bites, But Flames Devour
by TheHatterMaddox
Summary: Roy/Ed. Ed needs some help, but he didn't account for the weather, getting sick, feverish nightmares, or three weeks alone with Roy in his appartment. Neither of them accounted for the power outage or being snowed in. And why is Roy in denial?
1. Prologue

One

Roy Mustang had very particular ideas about love. _His_ love in any case. Women, as laws unto themselves found any and all rules to be inapplicable in his vast experience and other men's mishaps were none of his business. His rules are as follows. You should love beautiful women within five years of your age, or within ten if you were over 50. If for whatever reason he could not love a woman, he should love a homosexual his own age. Failing this, he ought to find a homosexual near to his age to love. If he found himself incapable of even this he should give up on romance and resign himself to solitude. As a foot note you should never be involved with a coworker or the relative of a coworker. Married and "taken" women are off limits- adultery is _bad_.

Roy believed heartily in the rules- they allowed him to have his fun within carefully predetermined lines. They prevented disturbed pedophilia, awkward obsessions and other messiness. In recent times he found the rules increasingly difficult to follow. The first challenge to his rule-abiding romantic existence came in the form of Riza Hawkeye. She was, just barely, within his age limits, but was thoroughly off-limits as not only a coworker, but the relative of one too. To make matters worse he had been entrusted with the responsibility of taking care of the girl. Somehow, following her every move out of the corner of his eye and encouraging her misguided attachment to him hardly seemed to qualify. In spite of all this, he found himself admiring the shift of her shoulders when she shot her gun, as she walked and when she did anything at all. He did it any time at all he could get away with it. He was captivated by the play of light on her corn-silk hair , the angles of her face and the planes of her pleasingly strong figure.

Then, the fuhrer separated them. At first it was a heart-wrenching loss, an ache in his chest every time he missed her presence, almost as if his heart was still with her and not in his chest. Then, he simply got over it. While he was partially relieved, he also felt empty at first without that familiar longing. A bittersweet ending he concluded, one way or the other.

No longer caught up in Riza, Roy hit a new low. He found himself in denial over his increasing attraction to the worst possible candidate. Age: only seventeen- _way _out of his range; a coworker and additionally _not even female._ Roy was, as a matter of fact, drawn to a seventeen year old boy who worked with him. The ultimate sin: the boy was perfectly straight and quite possibly already in love with someone who certainly loved him. Roy had fallen in love with none other than the Fullmetal Alchemist Edward Elric. You could call him a bad person- he already had called himself one by this point. You might consider him a pedophile- he certainly considered himself one. Neither of you would be entirely wrong. This observation, did not stifle, but instead fed the perverse infatuation. And so it is that in the middle of an almost war with non-humans who secretly gained control of the government Roy fell in love with a straight seventeen year old on a quest for the truth. Roy tended to consider himself a monster and so might you, but I never quite believed it. Which is why I have brought you the totally honest account in Roy's defense. With that said, it happened something like this.

***

To Whom It May Concern:

I guess when it comes down to it, I have Fuhrer Bradley to thank and blame. If you asked me when it was happening I blamed him. Now, mostly, I thank him, but there are still times when I hate him for what he did to me- and everyone else. Now it's all over, I'm just glad I can go back and at least explain where it all went wrong. I've accepted that what I did was probably wrong, but we're all happy with what I chose. That's probably the most important thing- Hughes always thought so. If he was here I get the feeling he would have been laughing and cheering for us all along- he was the kind that supported anything you went with as long as it made you happy (and didn't hurt anyone else). In either case, we did the very best we could possibly do with what we were given. That's good enough for me.

Fuhrer Roy Mustang

***

Yikes, super short chapter here. This is starting to become a bad habit with all my prologue chapters- I'll need to do something about that, and soon. Anywhoozle, I'm still working on typing up and editting the hand-written chapter of the next chapter, but _should_ have it up soon. I caught a stomach bug, so that'll slow me down a bit, as will make-up work, but I'm on the mend so it shouldn't be too long. So, for those of you who follow other fics of mine, look for updates soonest here and on the Shunsui/Ukitake fic Let Them Fall as well as Shatter Shatter Shatter Like So Much Glass (Kisuke/Ichigo) which may have a change of name coming up (because much as I love it, it has ceased to fit). Into The Black (Sebastian/Ceil) may be a while since my guest writer for the upcoming chapters writes unpredictably at best though I'll nag her to the best of my ability. That aside, I haven't worked on this in ages and I have to say I'm feeling pretty pleased with what I've editted thus far. When I have a whole chapter I will post straight away. Review, review, review (although there isn't much to review _on_)- even a mono-sylable like "nice" or a two-worder like "good job" speeds up the writing process, you know~!

The Hatter, out!


	2. Chapter One

Hey, all!! This my fifth fic to be posted, and people are already taking an interest!! Yay!^^! This, like everything else of mine, has not yet been beta-d (volunteers, please PM me or review), but I have gone over and edited so it shouldn't be too atrociously offensive. I _love _this pairing and these characters, they are wonderful!! Note: I am sadly and shamefully behind in cannon, so this won't be current or anything like it. It's mostly outside the actual story line so it shouldn't matter anyway, but you never know. Anywho, I feel really good about this, so enjoy!

One

It was 6:32 exactly, and the sun had been set for half an hour at least. Even in the back seat of the car and out of the frigid wind I was freezing cold. The heater was on, but the weak puffs of warm air couldn't contend with roaring sub-arctic winds and an air-temperature of only about six degrees. The military taxi driver was now making our tenth circuit of the block and there was still no sign of either of the Elrics, or even any of their odd companions. The streets had been deserted since the sun went down, and for good reason- the same ice that crunched beneath the tires and frosted the edges of the windows also coated the sidewalks beneath a thin powdering of old gray snow. And, there!

Coming around the corner was a cloaked Edward Elric, his face pinched with pain. Presumably, his automail was beginning to freeze his flesh. I couldn't help a pang of sympathy- metal got _cold_. When he caught sight of the car he began to sprint, his face twisting into a mask of agonized effort as he held his hood up with a gloved hand.

As he neared the car, I wrenched the door open, bracing it against the howling wind. As we pulled even at our steady crawl, Ed threw himself around the door and into the car, sending us sprawling backwards together. With an audible _crack!_ My head slammed back into the other car door, making me grown as my vision swam. Damnit.

Fucking Fullmetal. I came out in weather that would freeze hell over to do him a favor, and this is what I got. No good deed goes unpunished. I considered my selfless good deed to be suitably punished. Apparently, I had _really _pissed off karma today. The dampness in the corners of my eyes felt frozen. Damned tear ducts. When I could both see and breathe again I groped for the car seat beneath me and carefully tried to haul myself into an upright position. Which I failed horribly to do because of the huge dead weight on my chest. At least by some miracle he managed to pull the door shut behind him.

I glanced down at a splendid view of the top of Ed's head. His hair, golden blond with honey highlights and polished white gold highlights, shone like burnished silk in the unsteady light built into the roof of the car which had begun to flicker irritatingly. The next thing I noticed was that he was trembling. He hadn't moved from where he had fallen, sprawled across my body so his weight (more than would be expected) rested on my chest.

His automail hand was clenched in the shoulder of my jacket, the icy forearm rested across my shoulder so the remainder of the frozen metal was on my chest. His other hand, the real one (almost as cold), was clenched tightly in the cloth of my shirt somewhere nearabout the middle of my ribcage. His left (automail) leg was drawn up and half under him between me and the seat, pressed against my right hip, thigh and side while his other (real) knee was pressed into the seat between my legs, dangerously close to the more delicate (and prized) parts of my anatomy. He hadn't taken a breath in the time it took for me to absorb that information through the slow but terribly steady pounding that was building at the base of my skull.

Then he gasped and stopped breathing again. I couldn't see his face, but I could see the tremors running through his tiny body and he held on to me as if for dear life. If and when he breathed it was only in irregular, ragged gasps. His body was _cold, _almost deathly so, and close, but I didn't (almost couldn't) move. I wasn't exactly sure why or what for, but I waited.

*Mutter *mutter*mutter* I had no idea what he said.

"Cold" He half-whispered, half-whimpered; pressing his left side closer to me. No wonder he was in pain- that metal was cold enough to be giving him serious frostbite. It almost gave _me _frostbite.

"_Hurts,_ Damnit" He still didn't look up, but I could hear the tremble in his voice, pitched just a little high and full of air.

"Help" He pushed himself off me a little and held out the automail hand. "Please?" He pleaded, glancing up to meet my eyes and I was shocked. Ed's cheeks were flushed with cold and framed by his golden bangs. The tears gathered in the corners of his amber eyes and beginning to trickle down his cheeks and quivering chin had a stunning effect. Usually when men cried they looked pathetic and broken; sad creatures to be regarded with the highest level of disdain. Ed was in a class all by himself. He somehow skipped over pathetic and broken altogether and shot straight to sensitive- beyond even; he was outside the realm of description I normally applied to him (and most men) and pinched me somewhere in my chest right behind the medals on my left breast. It was like watching a woman cry- I could hardly stand to watch. I wanted him to stop.

I found myself taking the automail arm gingerly in my hands, using his sleeve to hold the metal and avoid its frosty surface and focused. For this to work I had to be very precise, but I was the Flame Alchemist and one couldn't afford to make mistakes with fire. I drew the oxygen little by little to form a layer around and within the automail, stopping at the elbow and keeping it thin. I pulled the jacket off that arm, taking the glove with it, rolled the sleeve up as far as it would go (still careful not to touch the metal directly) and lit the spark.

There was a _whoosh _as the flames devoured the oxygen then died, leaving behind only blackened automail and a tiny finger of flame on Edward's sleeve. I pinched the flame to put it out, not even scorching my callused fingertips on the flame, no larger than that of a match, and poked the metal- decidedly warm in a testimony to my skill, but Ed wasn't smiling. His hands were still clenched tight as if against agony and his brows were still furrowed in intense pain. His tears hadn't stopped though they had slowed . I shifted into a half-sitting position and he rested his head on my chest with a hiss of pain. Then it hit me. Of course! I realized: his leg.

"I'll lay you down so I can get at your leg" I explained, pointedly ingoring the stir of tingling sparks that danced unbidden in my gut. It was annoying, having to play body heater, but Fullmetal didn't cry easy and even if he did I hate to see people cry. Even if he hadn't cried, doing nothing would have been inhumane and cruel. He nodded his consent, biting his lip against any more giveaways.

I grabbed his real shoulder and wrapped an arm around his back, amazed as always by the sheer smallness of him: even at seventeen the top of his head didn't reach my shoulders. I braced the leg not trapped by his body on the floor and sat all the way up at last.

Fullmetal cried out, tightening his grip on me and burying his face in the lapel of my coat. He was shaking like a leaf against me which was worrying- what was so bad that that small move would make him cry out? If the frost bite had progressed that far, it might damage that leg permanently or scar him. He took deep, shuddering breaths and I gave his shoulder a sympathetic squeeze of encouragement- halfway there, halfway to go. I shifted, taking his entire weight on one arm so I could use the other to grab his automail leg, cold even through his leather pants. In one fluid movement I straightened the leg and laid him flat on the seat. He didn't cry out this time, but I could see all the air go out of him like he had taken a hard punch to the gut.

"Where does the automail end?" I asked calmly, meeting the teen's shining eyes and feeling the beginnings of a migraine build in the back of my head.

"Thigh." He replied, gritting his teeth against the pain "Why?"

Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, _shit._ I tugged despairingly at one tight, leather pant-leg, trying and failing to push it up past his ankle.

"You'll have to take off your pants" I told him, fighting back the hysterics that threatened to send me to the floor with laughter at the sad lack of comedy in the horrifically non-comedic situation. "They'd burn" I didn't meet his eyes then. There was a teen-aged boy laying on a car seat in front of me crying and I was asking him to take of his pants. Admittedly for his own good, but still. This wasn't even frustrating- frustrating was when Fullmetal slammed my head into a car door while I was trying to do him a favor. This, this was flat out degrading. Why was I such a damned altruist anyway?

"Do it" He told me, breathing ragged, fist clenched against the pain. To hell with it. And I did. I undid the brass button, worn smooth with use and pulled of the kid's needlessly tight black leather worn with use that left little of his lithe form to the imagination. Mentally, I was exhausting every expansive collection and combination of curses in two languages at my disposal. I made it about a third of the way through my Amestrian insults and had begun to mix in Ishbalan ones that were thrown hatefully at me during the war (_much _more explicit, graphically violent and physically improbable than even the worst of the Amestrian ones) in the time it took to throw them on the floor.

I hissed in sympathy- no wonder Fullmetal was crying. The metal portion of his leg was coated by a thick layer of frost that radiated cold, but it didn't stop there. The pale flesh where the metal attached was blistered blue with the beginnings of frostbite two inches up his leg which meant I had to act fast.

"This'll hurt" I warned, my mind already gone, my focus already shifted to manipulating the oxygen in the air.

"Just do it!"

I wrapped the oxygen in sheets and waves around the icy leg, starting at the foot and going up the ankle all the way to the knee. I slipped threads of it into the joints, sewing through the inner mechanisms with care. There was a faint beading of sweat on my body, a few distinct beads popped up on my forehead, but my hands hadn't started shaking yet- what if I burned him?

"_Roy_ . . ." He was in pain. Shuddering in agony, counting on me for help as I sat there in indecision, heart hammering. I lit the spark. There was another might _WHOOSH _as the flames raced up Ed's leg, melting the frost with a loud crackling. Ed gasped and I could see his muscles and tendons straining beneath his pale skin- the flames had reached the end of the metal and begun to lick at the frost-bitten skin. He was panting, eyes clenched shut and I could only stare.

"Roy" His voice wobbled, making my heart jump into my throat. "Put it out!" He croaked. I blinked, startled from my uneasy trance. _I was burning Ed_. I jumped, using my sleeve to smother the last of the flames as quickly as possible.

At last, the flames disappeared completely, leaving behind charred metal and ribbons of smoke that curled up from both my crisped sleeve and the blackened car seat besides Ed (boxers, leg, automail- all smoked profusely). Ed fell back, the air rushing out of him like a punctured balloon. I sat back on my feet, letting my own breath out as well as I looked down on the teen aged boy sprawled before me, trying to make sense of my own feelings.

Ed, laying back on a car seat in only a shirt and boxers brought on surges of emotions, sensations that I didn't want to feel, things I didn't want to remember. _Why did I panic?_ One this one point my mind was crystalline, and it wanted an answer. I, did not. I felt even now, a swell of raw sensations surging up from somewhere deep within in answer and I wrestled it down- I didn't want to drown in a sea of emotion demanding that I sort it out _now_, please; and in moments more I would have. I didn't stop to examine what all that emotion was- I didn't _want_ to know; at the moment it was better off that way. I may only have been delaying the inevitable, but I would take what I could get. I had enough to deal with between Bradley and the secret not-war without getting caught up in Fullmetal and all the issues around him too- any more than I already had anyway.

"Damn, that hurt" he groaned "I owe you one Colonel" His gold eyes were intense, making my neck prickle, but even so my devious mind was already plotting ways to take advantage of that debt (and it would be a big one too). I shoved that whole mass of thoughts into a back corner of my mind where I wouldn't be flabbergasted by my own imagination, and looked into his eyes. They were like burnished bits of gold and brass, those eyes. Solid, stubborn, and _hot, _the kind of heat I would imagine came from the sun if you were to stand really close to it. Even so, there was something cool and concrete about them, as ungiving as the metals the resembled and yet beautifully kind like nothing else. They were eyes that backed up his words, making you want to believe him from the bottom of your heart upwards, banishing any thought of empty promises.

It was a wonder there was _room _for all that in them; for all that strength and will-power in his tiny body, but he did it and made the whole thing effortless to-boot.

"I'll keep that in mind" I tried to put some sting behind the words, but they came out more like warm half-joking. _Not _what I intended. Fullmetal just grinned rather more tiredly than usual- there were dark circles under his eyes, framed by a series of thin wrinkles from lack of sleep, and there were hard lines in his faces, seemingly pulled too tightly over his skull. Tired, tight and worried. Which didn't bode well for either of us. In spite of myself, I found I was concerned- not only about him (and whatever predicament he was about to drag me into), but for him too.

He sat up gingerly, wincing as he slowly pulled himself upright. He slumped back in the seat, leaning his head all the way back on the top of the bench seats (no head rests).

I rapped three times on the almost-black pane of glass separating us from the driver, signaling for the young officer to stop. Immediately, the car drew smoothly to a halt.

I unlocked the door and grabbed the handle.

"Hey!" Ed shouted in alarm as I opened the door "What the he-" I stepped out and slammed the door shut in his face, smiling my satisfaction as I savored the confused anger in his face- maybe I didn't want to see Fullmetal cry, but I still _loved _to watch him squirm! I needed to do that more often- I deserved it for playing the body warmer and thawing him out.

I rapped the drivers window once with my knuckles and it promptly rolled down. My jaw dropped. I was probably gaping. I didn't seem to be able to stop.

"Riza?" I was utterly confused and more than a little worried about my reputation for _never _getting along with Fullmetal. What in all hell was _Riza _doing here? And more importantly had she caught the scene unfolding in the back seat through that almost-opaque glass? The thought made my stomach roll- it was the kind of thing Riza would never let me live down: it was just too nice. And too . . _questionable._

"Good to see you too Sir" She quipped, as drily sarcastic as ever, but there was a fond smile tucked in the corner of her mouth and something different entirely in her eyes. There was devotion, and loyalty, and beside them something I didn't want to see- something I was almost frightened to see in her now I knew it was nowhere to be seen in me. They were the same black eyes, same blond hair tied up beneath the cap that completed her driver's uniform, the same powerfully built shoulders and the same confidence, but when I looked at her now her eyes seemed less magical, her hair less silken and more like straw, her shoulders no longer filled in her uniform quite the same way. Riza hadn't changed and I knew it- _I _had. It should have (and in a way did) made things easier on my part at least, for now I would never have to admit to _that_. Hughes would have clapped me on the shoulder a little too hard, squeezed just hard enough and laughed with that lopsided grin only he could manage. Somewhere, I was certain he was still grinning it at my folly.

"Do me a favor?" I asked quietly, leaning in slightly to be better heard over the not-quite-as-roaring winds.

"Of course Sir. What is is?"

So I explained to Riza, who nodded briskly at all the right times and asked all the right questions without ever questioning me, all the while seeming intent on me, hanging on my every word and the way each word shaped my lips and hand gestures, an attention I had once returned. I no longer did, but I couldn't begrudge her that lingering gaze out of the corner of her eye, tracing some feature of my face for I had done just the same. Then Riza got out of the car, shivering in a sudden gust of colder air. I carefully undid the buttons of my jacket, shrugged out of the heavy warmth and shelter it provided and held it out.

"It's a little scorched and it smells like smoke, but it's better than nothing " I told her gravely, shivering furiously in winds that blew straight through my thin shirt. She lifted a brow, then nodded gratefully and pulled it on, snuggling into its warm depths, then walked away. I got into the car quickly, shut the door and watched her shoulders fill her uniform not-quite-the-same-way until she turned a corner and was gone. I rolled up the window, still shivering in the icy air, and stared at the dashboard a moment. Then I carried on with the plan, reassured by Riza's "eyes" trained as carefully as ever on my "back".

////////////////////////////////

So, that was fun! I love Roy. I really do. He speaks to me with such a good clear voice and he is _so writeable! _Ed is fun too! I started this such a long time ago I forgot how much fun it was XD. Also, I don't know (nor care) if any of the military cars have glass dividers (MINE _do. _That's all that matters). I also don't know if there is a specific uniform for people who drive the cars or if it includes a cap- again, I don't really care. Please review and tell me how you like it! (a LOT if you want updates)

The Hatter


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